Friday, 3 February 2017

Yazidi child reunited with family in Iraq after being sold by ISIL to strangers

Yazidi child reunited with family in Iraq after being sold by ISIL to strangers

Ayman, a boy from a minority Yazidi community, who was sold by ISIL to a
Muslim couple in Mosul, is greeted by a relative after he was returned
to his Yazidi family in Duhok, Iraq, on January 31, 2017.

RASHIDIYA, IRAQ // His name was Ayman, but
the couple who brought the boy home to their Iraqi village after buying
him for $500 called him Ahmed.

ISIL militants had killed or
enslaved Ayman’s parents in their purge of the Yazidi religious minority
to which he belongs, then sold the four-year-old to Umm and Abu Ahmed,
who are Muslims.
For the 18 months he lived with the couple, his
relatives assumed he was dead, one of thousands of Yazidis who have been
missing since the militants overran their homes in what the United
Nations has labelled genocide.
When
Iraqi forces retook east Mosul and the surrounding area last week, they
found Ayman and returned him to what is left of his family. While their
reunion was full of joy, breaking the bond between Ayman and his
adoptive parents brought new sorrow.
At his home in Rashidiya,
north of Mosul, Abu Ahmed swiped through photographs of the boy on his
phone, and empties a box of the toys Ayman played with, including a
children’s book for learning Arabic script.
The
windows of the couple’s one-story home on the eastern bank of the
Tigris river have been shattered by a blast that destroyed their
neighbour’s house, evidence of the fierce fighting that will continue
when the army attacks the western side, which ISIL still controls.
It
was Umm Ahmed’s idea to adopt a child. The couple were childless and
she heard ISIL was selling orphans in the town of Tel Afar, some 40km to
the west.
"My objective was to win favour (with God)," said Umm Ahmed. To be honest, I wanted to teach him my religion, Islam."
Her
husband, a government employee, was against the idea but could not
dissuade his wife, who went alone to get the boy from an orphanage run
by the militants, paying for him with her earnings as a teacher.
Although
the boy cried and did not want to go with her, she coaxed him, saying:
"Come, you will be my child. We will live together and I will buy you
everything."
Gradually
he grew accustomed to his adoptive parents, who taught him Arabic
instead of the Kurdish dialect spoken by Yazidis. They told people he
was a nephew they had taken in and enrolled him at the local school
under the name Ahmed Shareef, but mostly he was kept indoors.
"He
was really smart. I taught him to pray and perform ablutions. Do you
know how much of the Quran he memorised?" Umm Ahmed said.
They
did not want him to forget who he was and encouraged him to speak about
life in his village of Hardan. But she said: "I always warned him not
to tell anyone (he was Yazidi)."
ISIL imposed a radical version of
Islam in Mosul after establishing the city as its de facto capital,
banning cigarettes, televisions and radios, and forcing men to grow
beards and women to cover from head to toe.

The Yazidis, whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions, were branded devil-worshippers.
Sometimes
Ayman asked about the rest of his family but Umm and Abu Ahmed knew
nothing of their fate, save for a teenage sister who was taken as a
slave by a militant from Tel Afar. He brought her to visit several times
but nothing is known of her now. A half-brother of \ayman was also sold
from the orphanage but his whereabouts too are unknown.
As the
US-backed campaign to drive ISIL out of Mosul gathered pace and the
Iraqi army’s ninth division reached Rashidiya, things began to unravel
for Umm and Abu Ahmed.

On entering the village, a commander received a tip that a Yazidi boy
was being held there and dispatched soldiers to retrieve him. The
couple had no choice but to give him up. A video clip of the moment they
were parted shows Ayman clinging to Umm Ahmed and crying and Umm Ahmed
pleading with the soldiers as she tries to comfort him despite her own
distress, saying "You will go and see your mother now ... and when you
grow up you will come and see me".
Ayman’s
parents and most other relatives are still missing, but his grandmother
and uncle live on the edge of one of several camps to which the Yazidi
community has been displaced en masse, about 50km away from Rashidiya.
Samir
Rasho Khalaf thought his nephew had been killed until he saw a post on
Facebook on January 28 telling of a Yazidi child named Ayman Ameen
Barakat who had been found.
"I was stunned," said Mr Khalaf. "It’s a miracle: he came back from the dead."
That same night, they were reunited.
"We
all cried," said Major Wathiq Amjad Naathar, the army official who
oversaw the handover. That night, Ayman was beside himself and begged to
be returned to Umm Ahmed, but now seems happy and calm.
Asked if
he had been happy with his adoptive parents, he said yes. Asked if he
was happy to be back with his real family, he said yes too.
Mr
Khalaf said he was grateful to Umm and Abu Ahmed for keeping Ayman safe
and healthy, and that, unlike so many other Yazidi boys abducted by
ISIL, he was not forced to train as a fighter.
But
he was angry the couple did not try harder to find his family to say he
was alive and well, and has refused to allow them to talk to Ayman, .
"We don’t mention them (his adoptive parents) so he will forget them," he said.
Umm Ahmed said he will never forget them, however, just as they will not forget him. "I expect he will return," she said.